Ogle County Poet Laureate’s update: Politics in the O.C. (as no one calls it)

So, there was an election here recently. I received 2 oval-shaped “I voted” stickers when I told the tie-dyed-shirt-wearing poll worker that I like to put one such sticker on my dog’s collar so that it looks like he got a vote, too.

In this county where I have been declared, by myself, Poet Laureate, 67 percent of registered voters turned out, and 13,409 of them voted for Mitt Romney, while 9,504 voted for Barack Obama (this data is from the 8 Nov. Oregon Republican Reporter newspaper, which despite its name, seems mostly nonpartisan, and which information does not seem to be available online). If my math is right, this means Romney got 58.5% of our county’s vote, and Obama, 41.5%, a pro-Romney margin of 17 percentage points.

Nationally, Obama received a +2.5% margin, and Illinois on the whole went for Obama by a margin of 16.2 percentage points, according to this listing by Nate Silver. On that same list, Ogle County’s margin of 17 points for Romney makes Ogle County more Republican-leaning than the populations of the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Arizona, Mississippi, Alaska, Montana, and Texas.

But then, this really shouldn’t be all that surprising for what our Wikipedia article calls “one of the most consistently Republican counties in the nation when it comes to Presidential elections. In the last 150 years Theodore Roosevelt‘s 1912 run as a Progressive was the only time a non-Republican carried the county. No Democratic candidate has ever won the county, which favored the Whig Party before the Republican Party was formed.”

So reports the Poet Laureate of this GOP bastion permanently (short of some spectacular plate tectonics) located, to the impotent frustration of some of our local populace, only 90 miles west of Democratic-leaning Chicago.